Political Studies in the Near and Middle-East Seminar 2016-2018

The Political Studies in the Near and Middle East Seminar (2016-2018) is a research seminar resulting from a meeting between researchers and young researchers, doctoral students, writers, artists, etc.at the Paris 8 Saint-Denis University in partnership with the Medfil Institute, the LLCP-Paris 8 and Experice-Paris 8 laboratories, the Sorhawardi Research Center.

The starting point of this seminar is in the expressions of traveling theories which, where a conceptual chain was lacking (exiles, wars, and displacements, situations of subalternization in life, law, and the language, separations), is written in a cartography of narratives where statements and utterances can not be disjointed. These narratives are the concrete syntagms resulting from the encounter, the forms of life, their persistence, and the form of their historicity.On the other hand, the conflicts that cross the Middle East today are not separable from the history of the Sykes-Picot agreements. It is also necessary to approach them from a broader analysis of the conditions of globalization, this other name of colonization, in its political, social, economic, etc. dimensions.It is from a constant decentering, a decentering from which derives a difference in which the other names of history are inscribed, that the possible new forms of politics could be said.From there, this seminar focuses on the new forms of political agency and the post-national theoretical productions, the genealogies of violence and the languages ​​of memory, the construction of multiple affiliations, the experience of borders, the politics of knowledge and translation.

March 2 2017, The Hall Room from 15:00 to 18:00Collectif Solidarité Femmes Kobanê: Letters to the women political prisoners in Turkey
Serdar Ay (INALCO): Politics of Kurdish Languages ​​and Literatures
Rojda Alaç (EHESS): Life Strategies and redefinition of the “home”: The case of the displaced Kurdish population in their own region in Turkey

April 19 2017, Room A028 (RDC Building A) from 12:00 to 16:30
Rony Férat and Marina Nebbiolo (Institute of Medfil Humanities): Partitions / Apartheid / Translations in language and history – Reflections from Nurith Aviv’s films
Fabio Mengali (University of Trento): Zionist colonization in the mirror of the European class conflict / The external war and the internal war

Critique of the State in the Near and Middle East: Epistemology and Politics at Stake (2017-2018)Paris 8 Saint-Denis University, 2 rue de la Liberté 93526 Saint-Denis (France)

Western political modernity had at the same time excluded any other notion of politics than that in which political activity was rationalized in the State, in a sharing of so-called statesless peoples, also called without history, and others, any other construction than that based on the model of identity and difference and included as its margins the other possible versions of human life. This exclusion within or subordinate inclusion as one of the foundations from which the colonial and then global order has been able to develop and expand is constantly being repeated in the smallest scales of subjectivity, and the most collective injunctions to identity, as well as the economic logics, the geography of conflicts, etc.With the critique of the epistemologies of modernity, their decentering, and the return-on-history, could emerge the question of a concrete universalism, and other political meanings that feed a notion of new political agency, that is to say, a praxis that is not devoid of context or point of view. The old and modern models of identities and the political subject, especially from the point of view of ‘People-without-States’ living at the intersection of existing states and borders, show that the entanglement of identities contradicts their naturalization and their various hierarchies according to the logic of the Nation-Nation of the nation-state, on which connects the inexhaustible production of an “Other”, many others, the most numerous others, re-opening to a renewed criticism.

October 24 2017, Room A444 from 15h00 to 18h00
Amir Kianpour (LLCP-Paris 8): Non-synchronism as a mode of Asian subjectivation

January 24 2018, Room C103 from 14h00 to 17h00
Naji El Khatib (Institute of Humanities Medfil): The State in the Near and Middle East: Epistemology and politics at stake
Nan Kar Azadi Collective: Reflections on the recent uprisings in Iran

February 2 2018, Room G-2 from 13:00 to 18:30
Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun (Paris 7) / Éléni Varikas (Paris 8): Critique of the Nation-State with regard to the feminist and gender critic
Collective: Interventions, readings and discussion in solidarity with political prisoners imprisoned in Turkish and Israeli prisons (continued), with Assia Zaino (Paris 8 University)

February 7 2018, Room A217 from 18:00 to 21:00
Seevan Saeed (Kurdish Studies Center of the University of Exeter): The Kurdish Question in TurkeySession organized in cooperation with the Seminar Consequences (ENS-Paris)

April 24 2018, Room A028 from 16:30 to 19:30
Screening of the film “Behind the Fronts, Resistances and Resilience in Palestine” (Hybrid Pulse, 113 ‘, 2017) and meeting with director Alexandra Dols

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